My Favorite Crepe from France (feat. @Alex)

today i want to share the story of a glass what is it why is it made with buckwheat flour what are the kind of modern versions that you can order if you're visiting france and then most importantly we will learn how to make these at home because i'm not allowed to be in france much longer so i need to have this recipe in my home cooking toolkit because if it were up to me this would be the most popular crepe in the world that's how much i love these things man that butter one with just some cheese is so good first a little interesting context about the word galette if someone were to offer you a galette in the united states you would expect some kind of circular free-form pastry crust typically filled with fruits though there are plenty of options from sweet to savory now when i got here i was a little bit confused because the word galette can just refer to a lot of things that are flat and round for example a galetta bakery could mean some kind of free-form pastry just like in the u.s but in the grocery store you may see the term galette refer to a butter cookie or a rice cake and continuing on if you are in a french creperie and see the word galette you will assuredly be served up a thin deliciously brown and crispy buckwheat pancake which is our topic today now in addition to the word galette in a french creperie you may also see the terms crepe breton or crepe sarasin or just savory crepe to refer to these crepes with buckwheat and they generally do all have buckwheat though there may be some slight differences between them and french people you can kind of help me along with this video i've tried to gather all the information as best i could but let's start this story in the north of france the story of the galette starts in brittany which is france's north westernmost region and it's a hilly peninsula that extends out towards the atlantic why brittany well britney's great for growing buckwheat as noted in on food and cooking buckwheat is typically valued in colder regions with a short growing season and buckwheat known as sarasin in the french language comes from the plant that produces these triangular seeds and these seeds are then blended up into the buckwheat flour that is used for the galette batter now according to this taste france article buckwheat actually originated in asia but first appeared in brittany somewhere around the 15th century where its popularity peaked in the 19th century before severely declining in the 20th century though recently there has been a resurgence to protect this tradition of buckwheat in brittany the farmers of france created the fareemplenois de bruton and in 2010 received a protected geographical indication for bags of buckwheat flour grown and produced in brittany okay so why all the background on buckwheat well it's pretty simple this is the signature ingredient in the galette and there are two key benefits that a batter with 90 to 100 of buckwheat flour has over the 100 white flour batter that is typically used for sweet crepes and one of those benefits is taste one of those is texture [Music] from a taste perspective buckwheat has a distinctive nutty and slightly bitter flavor when compared to that regular white flour and the buckwheat flour creates this depth of flavor in the galette and pairs especially well with savory toppings secondly from a texture perspective buckwheat crisp up way better than the batter made with white flour why well buckwheat flour is actually gluten-free and it has a higher starch percentage which helps yields that distinctive crispy brown crust these two aspects are what made me fall in love with galettes because they're completely different from those sweet crepes that i used to know even a plain one rubbed with butter that is crispy is just perfect but when paired with some savory toppings oh it takes it over the top almost like it's almost like a little effect that well getting ahead of myself we'll make them in a couple of minutes but first i want to give a little more background on the origins of the galette because it actually has kind of changed a lot over the years before becoming what it is today according to one legend the original crep baton was born by a farmer's wife who spilled buckwheat porridge onto a very hot flat stone that was lying in the fireplace you never know exactly what is true with these origin stories but it is true that these were cooked over the open fire for a large number of years which is incredibly impressive to me i'll link this great article from crepey.info all about the history but here are some of the big dates in the galette timeline so starting in the 16th century buckwheat crepes are eaten all around brittany but it's just often plain eaten with super soup think like a basket of bread with your soup today then during the 18th century the serving of an egg begins to happen in the event of a prestigious guest next at the end of the 19th century the gillette sauce arrives the sausage gillette and additionally during this time the britain people start immigrating more around france and introduce the buckwheat crepe to new regions and cities and today the galette is cooked on an electric b-league and is served in a variety of forms with a variety of toppings and i always find it super interesting to see how these foods progress because even today there's not one single recipe and there are plenty of regional differences now at the surface gluts seemed like they'd be pretty easy to make but the more i got into this process i actually found it kind of hard to figure out the best way to make them at home because there are two big variables in how galettes are made and prepared and first is the batter type in my reading i came across three distinct styles of batter though there could be even more first is upper brittany which is literally one part buckwheat flour two parts water and some salt second is lower brittany which again one part buckwheat flour two parts water and some salt but additionally it has 30 grams of all-purpose flour a little black pepper an egg and some oil too also both of those recipes i found on the side of a igp certified bag so they should be legit then the third style while not as prevalent was a lower hydration batter which has roughly one part buckwheat flour to 1.4 parts water a little salt and some honey too so being me i had to make all three batters because i wanted to see firsthand what the differences were but instead of just testing by myself and going through the fact finding i do know a french guy that is pretty good at cooking and some of you may know him too alex i've got some batters to test oh wow nice amazing come on in what do we have man tell me i'm dying so i brought the batters over to alex's place but i actually didn't tell him which ones were which i just wanted to kind of have him go through them and give me his honest thoughts about them which ended up being a lot of fun but we also learned a lot too also just for just for alex is much taller than i am so we've had to give myself a little step stool so you gave me a couple inches yeah that's nice so i'm not normally this tall but but it's a nice it's a nice approach it also feels weird being high i feel like i'm really failing at being french on this one i don't have a club pan in this office i just have a normal non-stick pan but i guess it's also interesting to see what we can do with like normal tools i think this is what most people are going to have like that's that's what i'm all about at the end of the day for the testing procedure i first started with that upper britney banner then the lower brittany and finally that low hydration and we definitely started to pick up on some clear differences between them you get those nice holes too yeah very nice flavor is one point yeah yeah the texture i don't think so it should be should be fine i think it looks good yeah this one looks amazing it's amazing it looks amazing this one so we'll do the next batter and then we'll go back and crush them through but yeah this is a fun first test okay so that was that was ub we're gonna go we're gonna go lb and again we may need to just kind of see what we're coming coming up [Music] what with this one yeah we just go back to making crepes to making galettes again instead of buying them what kind of cook am i oh this one looks wow wow this one looks more rustic it does looks like like more like big picture perfect that is actually quite shockingly different oh yeah it's very different for sure so the first two batters were very similar texture wise but we did find that that lower britney batter kind of browned up a little bit nicer and more evenly and also the flavor of it was just slightly more mellow too however both of them were perfectly acceptable for me as a home cook lastly we had to put the low hydration batter to the test and this one just kind of crashed and burned it's almost like like soft ice cream yeah it's just way thicker and this was one of the things that i was going through go for it all right [Music] exactly sound it makes when it lands the whole table shakes i don't know if if it's appealing but it's very interesting yeah and and the recipes that i saw using this they were using the crepe maker with the spoon and i think you almost have to have that with this with that because that's so much lower than these where this we could swirl around this was impossible you couldn't yeah you couldn't as soon as it went in like i tried to smoosh it and it wasn't going anywhere so remember i said there were two big variables batter type being number one variable number two is the form factor including the toppings that are used from what i've seen the form factors generally fall under two families one i'll call the fork and knife galettes and the number two i'll call the handheld galettes so the most popular in classic galette complete is an example of form factor number one the cheese an egg and ham is added to the inside of that galette and then crisp on bottom as the ingredients inside cook once the egg white is set you just fold those edges over face up and alex did a triangle but many times at cafes you will see a square and this is kind of your proper sit down and enjoy a meal gala now obviously you can do any number of toppings with these which is why i think it's such a great dish to learn at home because you can really get creative so the fork in knife style glut was my first love but as the weeks went by i did discover another form factor and if you had to make me pick between the two i think i like the handheld versions just a little bit better [Music] as you would expect the handheld versions are more of an on-the-go meal and the gillette sauce is the most popular version in the city of ren france and it's a pork sausage with a galette wrapped around it then there's another handheld folded version which i saw at a lot of parisian markets and basically they're still filled with ham cheese and egg but they are folded in half and then into thirds to form a triangle which creates all these beautiful layers and textural contrast that's going to be a nice texture that's what you said earlier because then you're going to have crisp egg cheese crisp and cheese it's almost like the croissant like different yeah like it's the same it's the same kind of concept just you know this one is more expensive yeah yeah that's for sure yeah okay so one of the gallets that alex and i made were really great we both agreed there was one area that could use a bit of refining and that's the thickness ours were just a touch on the thicker side than those made on the b league which again is literally made for crepes and i really wanted to see what it was like to make them on the bay league to see if i could learn anything to improve my technique at home so that's exactly what i did [Music] after i explained i took a class at the creperie caramel sarasin in paris where the owner stefan showed us how to make sweet crepes and we got to practice on the b league with the rondelle the technique is a little hard to get used to but by the second time we honestly had it moving pretty well stefan also answered all my questions about the technique and did show us a galette as well that he makes at his shop in addition to sharing his recipe which was close to that lower brittany banner that i showed earlier and i learned a ton just observing and then being able to test it out for myself and would highly recommend if you are in paris [Music] this one looks good i'm pretty happy with this one so from this class i learned that the three key variables to help control the thickness are really the ratio of the batter to the pan size the temperature of the pan and then the speed that which the batter is thinned out and these were things that alex and i had started to pick up on and after a couple more recipe tests of my own i was able to get it just a little bit thinner i think i'm about 85 percent of the way there again it definitely helps if you have like the tools that are made to make crepes but with that being said let's run through the start to finish galette recipe that i hope all of you try at home for the batter again both work well but i want the lower brittany one this time around so to a mixing bowl add 250 grams of buckwheat flour five grams of salt and 10 grams of oil next i've beaten up one egg and i'm adding half of it and the general ratio is one egg per 500 grams of flour though feel free to add it whole if you want to then lastly add 500 grams or two parts of water and you want to add half of the water first and mix that together which is going to help you get rid of those clumps and then slowly add the remaining 250 grams and mix everything together now typically you let the batter rest in the fridge for a couple hours or overnight staphon actually recommended two days for his that being said i did test it just mixing it up and doing them right away and i didn't have any issues this time i let my batter rest overnight and let's assemble [Music] set the biggest skillet you have over medium heat and add clarified butter or a high smoke point oil i find the pan temp works best at around 375 to 400 degrees fahrenheit then add the batter and immediately give it a swirl to get it as thin as you can as quickly as you can you'll probably mess up the first couple don't sweat it so a couple of tips if you are having trouble at this stage so for this 12 inch skillet i was roughly using around 70 grams of batter which i found to work fairly well and then if you can pick up one of these rondelles they're only like 8 to 10 bucks on amazon and then another thing you can do is actually thin out your batter with a little bit more water it's just going to help it be more viscous in the pan so if it's kind of seizing up too fast try adding a little bit more water to your batter again just have fun with this process you're gonna mess up it's not gonna come out perfect if you get it perfectly on the first one um yeah i'm just not gonna believe you once the galette is browned and crisp on one side just pull it off the heat and set it onto a plate and at a quick place they're typically going to do the batter and toppings all at once without pulling it off the heat but for a home cook especially if you're doing this for more than one person i would recommend doing them in a batch where you cook four or five plain pull them off then cook them again to crisp and add your toppings [Music] and basically we're just making these pre-made galettes which they're soft right now because they've steamed up but then you just throw them onto the pan and get that super crispness you can also keep these in the fridge for a couple days you can probably freeze them too i haven't tried it and basically they do this in france too these are literally pre-made ones you can buy at the grocery store i will say these are like weirdly rubbery um plus you're not gonna be able to find these back in the states to finish these add a little more oil or clarified butter to the pan and add the galette with the brown side up for about 10 or 15 seconds then flip it over add a little more butter to the edges of the galette which will help start that crisp up and get it nice and browning and then you can add your toppings we'll do a galette complete first and then a rolled gallet sauce for the complete first get the egg down and break up that inner egg white membrane just so it cooks more evenly next coming with the cheese of choice i'm using some emensel and the thinly sliced cooked ham also a dot of mustard or honestly anything can be thrown in here so just let everything cook until the egg white has set and then the best that you can fold it into a square with that egg showing in the center and let the bottom crisp up to perfection before transferring that to a plate i hit mine with some black pepper and minced chive before serving [Music] for the gletzo sees it's the same concept except i'm just going to add the toppings off the heat so pop that gillette down in there and then just crisp it up just the same way as before and then do a little half fold each way and then this way we'll be able to roll up that sausage toss that on the plate add a smattering of mustard and some caramelized onion then place that brown sausage in the center and just roll that thing up and there you go super crunchy super delicious there are so many options you've got to try these [Music] so without a doubt glets have been my favorite thing that i learned how to make in france and like i said i had no idea they even existed before i got here and also let me know what you thought about this style of video i know there was a lot in it from like history to what it looks like today to the actual technique behind it um i could easily split this up into like a part 1 part 2 type thing but let me know down in the comments anyway recipe will be up on my website that's going to wrap it up for me in this one i will catch you all in the next one peace y'all

Channel: Ethan Chlebowski

Views: 378,072

Keywords: Ethan Chlebowski, best crepes in france, buckwheat crepe, galettes, galette complet, galette recipe, french galette, savory crepes, galette bretonne, galette bretonne recipe, buckwheat pancakes, crepe au sarrasin, galette complete, galette complete recette, ham cheese and egg crepe, frances best crepe, paris crepes, brittany galette

Id: 74RWIg_I_-c

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022